Letters: January/February 2026

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Every weekday, we post a photo on Facebook, Instagram, and our Daily Snap blog. In November, we spotted these students, who had moved their common room onto Cross Campus to enjoy one of the last mild late-fall afternoons. Readers on Facebook were impressed. “I am in awe of their efforts; some heavy furniture there,” wrote Ron Sipherd ’64. It was one particular detail that caught the eye of interior designer Elaine Griffin ’86: “They brought the rug! The RUUUUUUUUUG!!”

Mark Twain and Yale

Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s article “Mark Twain’s Adventures at Yale” (November/December) is New Yorker–quality writing. Its style and wit are a perfect tribute to its subject. “Sometimes, of course, Twain was just having fun.” Yale did itself honor, as well as honoring Twain, with two honorary degrees.
Patrick Henry ’67PhD
Waite Park, MN

The only hero I have left from my college days who hasn’t proven to have had clay feet is Charles Ives, the composer, Class of 1898. So I was particularly interested in the coverage of Twain’s close friendship with Joseph Twichell, Class of 1859. Twichell’s son David was Ives’s classmate and lifelong friend, and his daughter Harmony became Ives’s wife and soulmate. In his biography of Ives, Jan Swafford quotes him as writing that “I heard Mark Twain say through his own mouth, nose, and cigar as he pointed across the room . . . to Mr. and Mrs. Twichell: ‘Those two blessed people—how greatly indebted I am to them.’”
Tom Erickson ’71 
Wallingford, PA

Earlier this year I read both the novel James by Percival Everett and Ron Chernow’s book about Mark Twain. With that said, it came as a pleasant surprise to find even more insight into the character of Mark Twain upon reading your wonderful article. My enjoyment was right up there with the results of The Game.
Robert T. Hildebrand
Tyringham, MA

Thank you for the fine article “Mark Twain’s Adventures at Yale” by Professor Fishkin. The style in which Twain skewered the bombastic and exposed “pretentious falsities” would have great application today were it to be employed in preference to the usual vitriol. And the author was quite clever to include Twain quotations using the word “comet” no less than three times, foreshadowing his now-famous entry and exit with Halley’s Comet.
David Perry ’83JD
Nashville, TN

Another Yale link to Mark Twain, if a bit tangential, was the larger-than-life English professor William Lyon Phelps, who recounts in his autobiography the moment when, at age 12, he unwittingly shot some of Twain’s prize ducks with his new shotgun but managed to escape detection. Twain was a familiar figure in his Hartford neighborhood. 

Phelps was present at the 1901 celebration, and reports that Twain “received the loudest and most prolonged applause.” He then met Twain in Italy in 1904 on the occasion of Clara Clemens’s debut as a singer and had a long talk with him some days later. Twain, he reports, was strongly pro-Japanese in the Russo-Japanese war, and he seemed only grudgingly to accept Phelps’s verdict that Huckleberry Finn was his best book. He does not mention any confession of his transgression of a quarter-century earlier.
Roger Bagnall ’68
St. Louis, MO

Finding the foam house

Regarding the foam house you featured (“In the Wild,” November/December): In the late 1960s and the early ’70s, the Yale cross country team used to compete on the golf course and practice on the trails surrounding it. We were prone to wandering (trespassing) on the water company and adjoining lands. I remember my bewilderment as a freshman encountering these bizarre structures. An upperclassman explained that they were an architecture school project. One of my favorite long runs on Sunday morning was to enter through the decrepit chain-link gate on Fountain Street and follow the trails past the foam buildings and then follow the trails back to the golf course and Edgewood back to Pierson. 

Years later, I had the privilege of running those trails again when our daughters attended Yale. I was disappointed not to be able to find the two structures that are now missing, but I enjoyed finding the remains of the one pictured. Thanks for the article; it is a shame those woodlands are not enjoyed by more people.
Dan Larson ’73
Queensbury, NY

The president’s message

Regarding President McInnis’s address to the Class of 2029 (“Moments of Transition,” November/December): I found her words to be incisive, relevant, and appropriate for the occasion. She displayed the right tone in alluding to the problems of the day without elaboration or partisanship. I am a casual student of art, and I liked the way she succinctly interpreted the painting without getting overly didactic. Yale is blessed to have such a fine lady at the helm.
Henry Blumberg ’67
New York, NY

In her recent Opening Assembly address, President McInnis pointed out that in this rapidly changing world, “The world we create depends on how we treat one another.” I totally agree. She went on to say, “In this moment of rapid transformation, our nation is divided on key values.” In some ways, our nation will always be divided. I once heard someone quip that if there were only two people on Earth, there would be two religions.

Differing opinions are an innate aspect of being human. If the notion of being different was not the unconscious security issue that it is, the tools that President McInnis suggested would naturally exist. However, the matter of security now attached to personal opinions is preventing our paradigm of government from dying peacefully. We may not be living in circumstances that fomented the French Revolution, but some 200 years later, recalling the dramatic changes in thought that resulted could help us now.  

We’ve been trying to resolve problems using the same approach. Without changing how we address them, the differences in opinions at the root of our government’s predicament is a fool’s errand, or, as Einstein might say, the definition of insanity.

As President McInnis pointed out, “there is more than one way to get to your destination and . . . the well-worn trail isn’t the only one worth taking.” A solution, as unconventional as it may be, does exist. The foundation lies in Thomas Merton’s sudden awakening in 1958 to the fact that we are all one people—that separateness is an illusion, that only our brains perceive differences. While the idea of a spiritual revolution may seem radical, it would eliminate the unconscious security issues now preventing healthy change. President McInnis’s tools of “open-mindedness, and mutual respect for each other’s dignity and humility” would no longer be a mere suggestion, but a reality.

Human beings will always have differing opinions. A spiritual revolution would remove the unconscious aspect of security from the opinions currently standing in the way of collaboration and healthy problem-solving.
Catherine Tuggle
Winona, MN

Ms. Tuggle is the widow of Kenneth J. Tuggle ’62. —Eds.

The founding myth

With regard to your very interesting article on the founding of Yale (“How Firm a Foundation,” November/December), I submit that, as with many foundational stories of great institutions (such as Christianity, Judaism, et al.), it is the essential truth of the story as opposed to the historical details that is most important. The First Congregational Church of Branford treasures the table on which the founding books were placed and uses it regularly as our communion table.
William D. Hall ’69
Branford, CT

“Old Yale” in the November/December issue recounts how the colonial General Assembly tried to gain control of Yale in 1763 by the disingenuous maneuver of sending a committee of visitation, and how Yale’s then-president, Thomas Clap, saw the danger to Yale’s independence this would create and headed off the proposed committee by means of a tale about Yale’s origins that was more myth than fact.

Or to put it more succinctly, Clap evaded the Assembly’s trap by using a bit of claptrap.
David Hoffman ’80
Alon Shvut, Israel

The swim test

Stuyvesant Bearns’s letter (July/August) about Yale’s freshman swim test reminds me of mine in 1951. Not comfortable in any pool, I approached the test with trepidation. As I completed the requisite four laps, barely and with great effort, the instructor leaned down and proclaimed: “Kroloff, technically you passed, but I strongly advise you to take the freshman swim course.”

That was the best advice I received in my four years at Yale! For the past half century, I have done my laps three times a week. As a newly minted nonagenarian, I attribute my longevity in some measure to that Old Eli regimen that began before I entered my first class at Yale. 
Charles A. Kroloff ’55
Westfield, NJ
 

The role of humility

Your latest issue mentions the founding of the Yale Center for Civic Thought. One thing I rarely see in public dialogue is intellectual humility—the expressed recognition that regardless of how much we know about a problem, we don’t necessarily have solutions which both solve the problem(s) and are collectively acceptable. People usually propose solutions or take positions, then support or defend them, rather than engaging those concerned to uncover issues and discuss possible solutions.

I wonder to what extent this intellectual blind spot is discussed in classes. This is a meta-issue regarding all discussions.
Dennis Leister ’68
Rockville, MD

It happened at Newnham 

There’s a small item in your recent issue about how the new movie After the Hunt begins with the claim “It happened at Yale,” when in fact the movie was shot in England (Campus Clips, November/December). Yale readers may be interested to know that the film was shot at Newnham College, Cambridge—the educational establishment I went to when I graduated from Yale in 1978. 

When I arrived at Newnham to continue my study of English, culminating in a PhD in 1984, I felt an immediate sense of belonging. I now wonder if it was in part inspired by the likeness in architecture. In any case, it’s pleasing to have an external endorsement of two places that have figured in my personal history. I am a Newnham Honorary Associate, which means that I voluntarily provide coaching and mentoring to students and occasionally alumni as well as offering life skills workshops and leadership development to both students and junior fellows. I also offer mentoring to Yale alumni, which I very much enjoy. It’s nice to feel these two institutions have come together in this recent film. 
Karin Horowitz ’78
Cockayne Hatley, UK